Thread: iphoto 06 vs. 04 (or maybe my mac sucks?)

I have an ibook g4 900 mhz. Despite all the claims that everyone loves their macs, mine slows down quite a bit. The very worst is iphoto. If I want to drag a photo into the trashbin, I get the pinwheel of death for a good 45 seconds.

I've heard iphoto 06 is infinitely faster than 04, so maybe it's just that, which is bogging down my system.

If iphoto isn't the culprite, any idea what could be? I clean my cache regularly. I have 30 gb of hard drive left. I upgraded to 640 mb of ram. Lately I've been running firefox instead of safari, which seems to help a bit overall.

Originally Posted by shmerham

I have an ibook g4 900 mhz. Despite all the claims that everyone loves their macs, mine slows down quite a bit. The very worst is iphoto. If I want to drag a photo into the trashbin, I get the pinwheel of death for a good 45 seconds.

I've heard iphoto 06 is infinitely faster than 04, so maybe it's just that, which is bogging down my system.

If iphoto isn't the culprite, any idea what could be? I clean my cache regularly. I have 30 gb of hard drive left. I upgraded to 640 mb of ram. Lately I've been running firefox instead of safari, which seems to help a bit overall.

The early versions of iPhoto were absolute dogs when it came to processor usage. The last couple of versions have been much faster.

Iphoto SUCKS BALLS. It strips your ICC data, it uses a fucked up folder system that doesnt match what you see in the program. The only thing Iphoto is good for in my opiion is to get you to pay the $$ for Aperture wich is worth every peny.

Gundy, what's ICC data? And how much is this Aperture?

I have thousands of photos, not tens or hundreds of thousands... and I use a p&s. Is aperture still for me?

Grant's just waving his schlong around. You don't need aperture and you can't run it anyway. iPhoto is fine for the average user, which is who it's designed for. I had a similar problem to yours with my ibook. You have tons of HD space, so that's not it. You could do with more RAM, put a 1gb stick in for 1.25gb, but I think you'd do well with iphoto 06 as well. If you can find someone with an install disc, there's not an activation key for ilife 06, so getting it is pretty easy. Or you could bittorrent it or perhaps limewire. ebay should be pretty cheap as well. I'd offer to burn it for you and send it, but you need a dual layer DVD disc, which costs a few bucks and I don't have readily available. 06 has some cool new features like full screen viewing and editing.

Aperture is $299, btw.

Edit: Looks like 1gb stick of ram can be had for a little over $100. Go to dealram.com and select ibook G4(be sure to figure out if you need pc2700 or pc2100 ram, it will say in your system profiler in "about this mac" under the blue apple drop down).

Originally Posted by mtbakerskier

Iphoto SUCKS BALLS. It strips your ICC data, it uses a fucked up folder system that doesnt match what you see in the program. The only thing Iphoto is good for in my opiion is to get you to pay the $$ for Aperture wich is worth every peny.

I'm just beginning to accumulate photos, now that I finally have a digi camera, and I have to say that how iPhoto organizes/files all the photos is very confusing. If you want to get to the actual file where a particular photo is stored in, it actually takes a bit of work to figure out where that is, at least for me. I know I suck at iPhoto, but it shouldn't be that confusing. Was wondering about Aperture, certainly don't need it at this point, but I can see this problem only getting more confusing as my library of photos grows.

Any other suggestions?

One thing I do like about iPhoto is how easily it integrates into iMovie, for creating slideshows beyond what iPhoto can do.

Originally Posted by shmerham

I have thousands of photos, not tens or hundreds of thousands... and I use a p&s. Is aperture still for me?

It depends on how much you care about your images. Even if you dont get Aperture, at least use SOMETHING instead of Iphoto.

ICC profiles is the info that your camera embeds in the digital photo that tells every other device (Your monitor, printer etc) What the actual colors are supposed to be. Sure with out it Reds are still going to be red, but more than liekly not the correct shade of red.

BTW Adobe Lightroom, is free from Adobe in a beta version, while its is not as good as aperture it is 1000X better than I photo.

From this page

ColorSync now supported in iPhoto 2: Implications
I received the following message from Apple ColorSync support:

"iPhoto 2.0 does use ColorSync. It honors embedded ICC profiles. But, since it's a consumer application, there are no tools for embedding profiles. You would need to use AppleScript or an application like Photoshop or even GraphicConverter.

To produce JPEGs that will look the same on a Mac and a PC, you should embed the sRGB profile. We ship this profile as part of Mac OS X. It's in System/Library/ColorSync/Profiles/."

A few comments:

1. It's great that Apple's ColorSync support people responded to my inquiry!
2. It's good that iPhoto 2 will support ColorSync (by implication iPhoto 1 did not, which is amazing.)
3. I think some of the problems (dark images, low brighness) iPhoto users have with printing shots on consumer printing services and sharing with PC users are due to iPhoto's lack of support for embedding profiles.
4. I think Apple needs to get beyond using the "consumer application" excuse for some basic design flaws (such as lack of scaling beyond 1000 images with titles and comments, and lack of profile embedding). Just because consumers don't think about these things doesn't mean then don't need them.
5. OS X Image Capture can embed color sync profiles. It can also be set to launch on startup instead of passing off immediately to iPhoto. I'm going to set Image Capture to take my images first, then embed the sRGB profile, then pass them off to iPhoto.

Originally Posted by mtbakerskier

it uses a fucked up folder system that doesnt match what you see in the program.

Actually, that's one of the reasons I don't use it anymore. Also, it's editing features are shite. So I spent $30 and bought this:

http://www.lemkesoft.com/en/graphcon.htm

I organize my photo files the old fashioned way: hierarchical folders. They're super easy to find and organized in a logical manner. When I need to play with them, I just load them up in GC. I don't make albums or slideshows. I basically just post them up here or send them out to friends via email or cd. So I don't need those things in iPhoto. What a I do need is a decent editor, which iPhoto is not. Your needs may be different.

Another great option is Photoshop Elements. It's only $80, is way more powerful than iPhoto, and offers some organization tools also.

Good info, thanks gents. Have to look into them...

Originally Posted by shmerham

I have an ibook g4 900 mhz. Despite all the claims that everyone loves their macs, mine slows down quite a bit. The very worst is iphoto. If I want to drag a photo into the trashbin, I get the pinwheel of death for a good 45 seconds.

I've heard iphoto 06 is infinitely faster than 04, so maybe it's just that, which is bogging down my system.

If iphoto isn't the culprite, any idea what could be? I clean my cache regularly. I have 30 gb of hard drive left. I upgraded to 640 mb of ram. Lately I've been running firefox instead of safari, which seems to help a bit overall.

I have an iBook G4 933mhz, hundreds of pics in iPhoto, only about 5gb to spare on my HD, and I do not have this problem. I have updated to OS X Tiger (10.4) and the latest iLife suite. I don't think of myself as much of a computer guy, nor am I very proactive about maintenance in terms of file management. Your iBook is young and spry enough to handle this task. Visit the Genius Bar (such an unfortunate name) at your nearest Apple store and let them help.

Does Aperture integrate with the rest of the iLife suite? I'm not a big fan of iPhoto, but its tough to beat its integration with iLife and the ipod.

Originally Posted by jibij

Does Aperture integrate with the rest of the iLife suite? I'm not a big fan of iPhoto, but its tough to beat its integration with iLife and the ipod.

no, aperture is completely standalone as far as the rest of apple's software goes. you'd have to export the file to a folder in order to use it with imovie, etc. the most that it integrates with is an "external editor" of your choosing (photoshop in most everyone's case). you can also make photobooks and order prints a la iphoto, but that's pretty much it.

i like aperture - it's really powerful, is non-destructive (which is a HUGE plus in my estimation), and has a lot of good tools for editing. the only gripe i have with it is the hardware requirements - i'm running a dual core 2.0ghz with 2GB ram, and almost 1TB storage (waves dick). BUT, aperture continually slows down because i "only" have the base model graphics card that comes with the powermac G5s (geforce 6600LE). if i wanted flawless performance out of the program, i'd have to shell out about $800 for a geforce 7800GT, which isn't happening. other than that, it's a great program in my estimation.

I know iPhoto sucks but I can't justify apiture just now, I also continue using iPhoto because I get hard in my pants when I can make great slideshows, with music, export them as .mov and then burn the to DVDs... does any other software do this??? If yes, I'm all over it.

I find my iPhoto slows down the more images you have and then starts to crash when it has too many photos (2000+)... my "reach-a-round" solution is iPhoto Manager some freeware that allows you have muchos iPhoto libraries...